This paper argues that planning entails distributed, mutual contributions of individuals, their social partners, and their community institutions. We suggest that these mutually involved contributions can be viewed through shifts in focus of analysis, contrasting with analyses of cognitive development that treat individuals as though they exist apart from their social and cultural worlds.We illustrate this argument with a study examining the distributed nature of planning to remember in a complex everyday task. We investigated the personal, interpersonal, and institutional cognitive contributions of 16 Girl Scouts, their mothers and customers and other companions, and institutions (the national organization and the cookie company) in keeping track of deliveries and planning collection of money in Girl Scout cookie sales and deliveries. The article also discusses an analytic methodology (Functional Pattern Analysis) for abstracting findings from the details of rich ethnographic data.Individual scouts, their mothers, customers, and the scouting organization and cookie company all played significant roles in keeping track of progress. In particular, tools and supports provided by the cookie company played a key role in organizing the cognitive tasks, and the scouts collaborated in planning with other people (usually their mothers and customers). Our findings illustrate the importance of examining contributions beyond those of the individual, while still recognizing the active roles of individuals in thinking. We argue that conceiving of individual, interpersonal, and institutional/cultural contributions as mutually constituting aspects of cognitive activities supports this aim beyond the usual focus on separate individual and 'external' factors. Individuals, Partners, Institutions 267This article makes the argument that the distributed, mutual contributions of individuals, their partners, and community institutions to planning can be studied with analyses that focus on one or another of these contributions, keeping key aspects of the others part of the analysis. This contrasts with common approaches that treat these contributions as independent factors or entities that can be understood without regard to each other. We illustrate our argument with a study of planning to remember during cookie sales and delivery by Girl Scouts, their mothers and customers and other companions, and the national scouting organization and the cookie baking company. We also use the observations to illustrate a method of qualitative data analysis that involves successive abstraction from ethnographic details of complex everyday activity to create generalities across specific cases.Sociocultural theory suggests that the study of cognitive activity requires analysis of the mutual contributions of individuals, their partners, and the community/ institutional traditions in which people participate. Usually, however, the development of planning has been studied with individuals doing set problems in laboratories, with little attention to contr...

This study examined the planning that occurred when children participated in classroom playcrafting with either adult or child leadership. In a first-/second-grade classroom in an innovative public school, we videotaped 11 sessions in which children volunteered to develop a play with small groups of classmates and seven sessions in which adult volunteers (parents and a grandparent) developed plays with small groups of children. The plays were crafted in one session of about an hour, and then usually performed for the class.More planning took place during child-than adult-directed sessions (averaging 92 vs. 35 percent of the session's duration). The groups led by children were more frequently involved in planning of themes, planning of details of the themes, and especially in improvisationally mindstorming ideas than were the groups led by adults. In adult-directed sessions, the adults often planned the play before the children joined the activity, and the children spent most of the session in non-playplanning activities such as gluing and coloring puppets or rehearsal of lines designed by the adult in advance. We argue that opportunities to observe and participate in planning-which occurred more frequently in child-directed than adult-directed sessions-are important to the development of planning skills and of co-ordination of plans with others.

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Results from two investigations examine the relationship between problem solving strategies (leaping and flexibility) and measures of insight and scholastic aptitude. In Study 1, university students were asked to use minimal information to solve perceptual and linguistic items on a clue‐efficiency task. Results reveal a significant relationship between both leaping and insight scores and flexible‐leaping and scores on the quantitative subtest of the SAT. A second study examined the developmental trajectory of flexibility, leaping, and clue‐efficiency. Developmental declines, notably between fifth and sixth grades, are reported in the use of flexibility and leaping. These developmental declines do not result from shifts to more sophisticated (e.g., efficient) strategies, as no developmental differences in efficiency were observed.

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